Quotes from John Sweeney

Why should a company like Wal-Mart - who made $10 billion last year alone - be able to force taxpayers to foot the bill for their health-care costs?

They had taken me to an exhibit called 'Psychiatry: Industry of Death' on Hollywood Boulevard, where a Scientologist told me psychiatrists set up the Holocaust. I feared I was being brain-washed. And then I lost it - big time.

I wish I hadn't lost it, and for the rest of my life I can never again lose my temper on TV. The BBC could have sacked me and that would have been the end of my career on TV.

The church acknowledges some Scientologists choose to sever communications with family members who leave. The church says it is a fundamental human right to cease communication with someone. It adds disconnection is used against expelled members and those who attack the church.

Satellite technology is a wonderful thing. From space, we can stare down and look at perimeter fences, huts, mine entrances and even sites of mass graves.

In North Korea, journalism, the job of telling the stories power and money do not want told, of giving a voice to the voiceless, does not exist.

A simple test of a civilised human being is how they describe those who have treated them badly.

Restless, he begs for storms, As though in storms there is rest.

album sleeve, black, with a black triangle, from which flowed a narrow rainbow of light. Zeke

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times, wrote Gustave Flaubert.

Bureaucratic entropy' was

My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: 'I don't believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.

No, he is not mad. He is very bad. I am certain he is totally healthy. He has a very peculiar personality. Not that of a KGB officer. He's different, sadistic, not thinking about other people, not even the Russian people, only himself. He has these predecessors like Hitler and Stalin. We can say they did bad things but that they didn't do them because a voice told them to do it. They were evildoers. They were sadistic people. But they weren't insane.

Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did.

I am naturally concerned that the Central Intelligence Agency is displeased with me. But then it is an organ of the United States, and not every judgement of that country has been for the best. Please note it was created in Anno Domini 1776. I would point out to you that my local pub, The Bear and Ragged Staff, is two centuries older than your country, and if that's a problem for you I don't care, and nor does my boss.

Over Emily's grave, Peach said the Lord's Prayer in a

Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country's collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose

Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it 'had been stabbed in the back'. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.

he executed a 360-degree turn that made him no friends,

Restless, he begs for storms, As though in storms there is rest. It

He hadn't finished: 'Let us bring down our righteous anger against the festering scum who by their cowardice and sloth have reduced the British Empire to a moribund thing, in peril of annihilation.' How they roared their hate!

When religion becomes organised, man ceases to be free. It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.

Wars are lost or won by possession of three keys: morale, logistics, leadership.

And I say to myself, please, John, don't throw up over Vladimir Putin.